by cnbc.com — Making good on a pledge to sever ties with Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Endeavor talent agency on Friday returned a $400 million investment from the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund. The news, first reported by The New York Times, comes six months after Khashoggi’s death. Endeavor, helmed by […]

by dw.com — Germany will not declare Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement a terrorist organization, a top official said Friday. Minister of State Niels Annen told news magazine Der Spiegel that the Iran-backed Shiite Islamist movement is a relevant factor in Lebanese society and part of the complex political landscape in the country. Read more: Iran’s military power: What you need to know The comments come after Britain last month banned Hezbollah’s political wing, accusing the movement of destabilizing the Middle East. “The British move is a national decision that has no direct impact on the position of the German government or the EU,” said Annen, a top Foreign Ministry official.

The European Union had already added Hezbollah’s military wing to a list of banned terrorists groups in 2013. Hezbollah is represented in the Lebanese parliament and holds three of 30 ministries in the government led by Western-backed Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri. The movement’s armed wing has expanded its influence in recent years in Lebanon and Syria, where alongside Iran and Russia it backs the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. In Lebanon, it is considered to be more powerful than the Lebanese army. Hezbollah, or Party of God, was conceived by Muslim clerics in the 1980s in response to the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1982. The Shiite group has a political and military wing.

As the once-powerful Islamic State (ISIS) crumbles, and its desperate fighters make a last stand in its final enclave surrounded by U.S.-backed coalition forces, its ideological leader is nowhere to be found. ISIS militants who have surrendered to coalition forces believe that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has abandoned the struggle when his leadership is needed most. His absence is causing deep fissures within the crumbling terrorist organization, which, though eroded, still boasts between 28,000 and 32,000 soldiers. “He’s hiding somewhere, people were angry,” Mohammed Ali, an ISIS fighter from Canada who was captured by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, told The Sunday Times. The ideological appeal of ISIS and Islamic extremism remains, but Baghdadi’s leadership vacuum and the receding territorial losses of what’s left of ISIS holdings in Syria diminish the influence of the once-powerful organization.

“Iraqi intelligence is following Baghdadi and we believe he never stays in one place for more than one day,” Abu Ali al-Basri, director general of Iraq’s intelligence office at the Ministry of Interior, told Fox News. “We have information he still moved from towns in Syria and entered the Iraq border through Anbar (province) with movement to bordering Salahuddin (province). Although Baghdadi remains far from the battlefield, he has continued to urge his loyal and ardent followers to carry on the fight. His most recent call to arms was in a series of audio clips released in August 2018.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon on Thursday warned its Mediterranean neighbors that a planned EastMed gas pipeline from Israel to the European Union must not be allowed to violate its maritime borders. Beirut has an unresolved maritime border dispute with Israel – which it regards as an enemy country – over a sea area of about 860 sq km (330 square miles) extending along the edge of three of Lebanon’s southern energy blocks. Israel is hoping to enlist several European countries in the construction of a 2,000 km (1,243 mile) pipeline linking vast eastern Mediterranean gas resources to Europe through Cyprus, Greece and Italy at a cost of $7 billion.

by arabnews.com — DUBAI: The family of a Lebanese student, who was killed in the UK’s northern city of Manchester, said they were expecting him home for tea when they got the knock at the door from police to tell them their son had been stabbed to death. Youssef Makki, 17, who was a student […]

by reuters.com —The White House hosted CEOs of major corporations who joined a Trump administration advisory board on workforce issues, including from Apple Inc, IBM Corp, Lockheed Martin Corp, Siemens USA and Home Depot Inc, who are part of a 25-member board co-chaired by President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary […]

  by cnbc — Google says it paid men less than women in certain positions, according to its annual analysis, with some male software engineers receiving less discretionary funding than women. Google compensated 10,677 employees an extra $9.7 million to offset the underpaid wages found in the study, the company wrote in a blog post, […]

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) by  David Lawder – Lebanon has withdrawn its nomination of Ziad Alexandre Hayek to run for World Bank president, but the government privatization official said he is trying to persuade board members of the multilateral development lender to renominate him. Hayek told Reuters on Monday that he received a formal notification from Lebanon’s finance ministry that his nomination was rescinded, two weeks after he announced his candidacy on Twitter. He said the decision was due to pressure from other governments, which he declined to name. An official with Lebanon’s finance ministry confirmed that the nomination had been withdrawn before it was registered by the World Bank’s nominating committee, adding: “there was no American pressure or other (pressure).” The same official said some parts of the Lebanese government which includes nearly all of Lebanon’s rival political factions – wanted to nominate Hayek, but others did not. In the end, the finance ministry decided not to proceed with a candidate viewed as having little chance of winning, the official said. The withdrawal leaves U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs David Malpass as the sole announced candidate to lead the World Bank with about 10 days to go before the nomination period closes on March 14. A World Bank spokesman declined to comment on the decision. The United States, which wields the most voting power on the World Bank’s board, has chosen every leader of the institution since it began operations in 1946. Challengers from Nigeria and Colombia emerged in 2012 under a new open nomination process when the U.S. nominee, Jim Yong Kim, was first elected as World Bank president. Kim resigned in January to join a private infrastructure fund

By Maria Vasilyeva MOSCOW (Reuters) – In pre-war Syria, Safaa Al-Kurdi sold wedding dresses. Fed up with the conflict, the mother-of-three fled Damascus four years ago and sought asylum in Moscow. Now, Russia is saying she must go home. Safaa is one of thousands of Syrian refugees that Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad, […]

by Chris Neiger (TMFNewsie) — There’s a battle raging between a handful of data storage companies to be the dominant player in the public cloud computing market. Apps, analytics, advertising, artificial intelligence and a host of other services all depend on cloud-based data to function, which is why Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) have invested so heavily in this tech over the past few years. Each company is trying to carve out more market share in the $278 billion (by 2023) public cloud computing market. And the good news is that there’s likely enough cloud computing demand for all three companies — and their investors — to benefit. If you’re interested in investing in the top cloud computing stocks, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon are the top-notch contenders you should be considering. Here’s why.

Alphabet’s growing focus

Alphabet sells cloud computing services through its Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and right now it holds a 9.5% market share, making it the third-largest player behind Amazon and Microsoft. The company doesn’t disclose how much its cloud platform makes, but a recent report from Canalys estimates that sales from GCP were $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018. That’s far less than Amazon’s revenue of $7.3 billion, but Google is making moves to help it catch up to its rivals. Google has made several purchases of smaller cloud computing companies to help boost its services, the most recent one being the acquisition of a cloud migration company called Alooma. Google has also said that it will spend $13 billion to add additional data centers throughout the U.S. to improve its cloud services. On Alphabet’s most recent earnings call, management said that GCP had more than doubled the amount of cloud computing deals worth more than $1 million last year. And with the company’s recent commitment to spending billions on building more data centers and snatching up smaller cloud companies along the way, counting Alphabet out in the cloud space would be a huge mistake.

Microsoft’s reinvention of itself

Microsoft has emerged as one of the strongest cloud computing contenders through its Azure cloud service. The company has about 16.5% of the market right now, and in the most recent quarter sales from Azure were up 76% year over year. The company made several significant cloud deals in the second quarter, including agreements with UBS, MasterCard, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Starbucks, and Kroger. The new Kroger deal will use Azure and Microsoft’s artificial intelligence prowess to improve in-store customer experiences. Microsoft’s Azure is not only generating significant sales for the company, it’s also an essential driver of gross margin as well. In the second quarter the company’s commercial cloud gross margin increased by five points to an impressive 62%. For a company that was once synonymous with PC software, it’s nothing short of amazing for Microsoft to have successfully transitioned to the cloud — and become the No. 2 player no less. Investors should expect a lot more from Microsoft’s cloud business, as the company looks to pair Azure even more with artificial intelligence in the future to become a dominant AI cloud computing company.